Hits

When we were having all the site crashes in October, John A turned off the hit counter to economize on space. We were running about 5000 hits/day at the time. We’ve been running without hit information for a few months. John figured out some way of getting the counter back without using as much space as the previous counter and turned it back on about a week ago. We’re now running at 8500 hits/day, a quarter million/month. Thanks for visiting. Quiet people are allowed to comment too.

I would say that this data underestimates Steve’s site popularity since Alexa relies on people installing a special toolbar (basically spyware). I know it is presumptuous of me to state this, but I believe the people on this site are more scientifically minded/computer savvy and so would be less likely to be using the Alexa toolbar.

would say that this data underestimates Steve’s site popularity since Alexa relies on people installing a special toolbar (basically spyware). I know it is presumptuous of me to state this, but I believe the people on this site are more scientifically minded/computer savvy and so would be less likely to be using the Alexa toolbar.

There is another, more prosaic reason. Here are the stats for platform type:

Now the Alexa toolbar only runs on Internet Explorer which in turn only runs on Windows (there is a version for Mac but no MacHead I know uses it). So since nearly half our readers are not using IE even though most of them are running Windows would mean that even if all of our readers who use IE were to install Alexa it would still miss (at least) half our traffic.

There must be a better way to monitor traffic but I don’t know what it is. Yet.

#4 – I think that there’s apples and oranges here. I think that their count is for visits; our hits count page views, and people usually go to 2-3 pages per visit. I suspect that the average number of page views here per visit is higher than there, but that’s just a hunch. There’s also a lot of spam traffic; I don’t know how it affects the stats, but both sites probably have the same situation.

Why not run an external statistics counter? They are free, and a snap to install. I use StatCounter as it has a pretty interface and it seems more reliable than some others (http://www.statcounter.com). SiteMeter is very popular amongst political blogs (http://www.sitemeter.com) and can easily be configured to let anyone see your hits whenever they want.

Again, I’ve had a post censored at RC; this time on their not-so-veiled attempt to taint Dr. Richard Lindzen, in part by attacking (or allowing posts that attack) implied financial ties, without actually mentioning who? Some of these alleged ties are as tenuous as their statistics.

I tried simply to point out that GISS’s Dr. James Hansen, whom RC champions in at least one recent thread, has been the announced beneficiary of a $250,000 dollar award by the Heinz Foundation; and should we be suspicious of his AGW pronouncements at politically opportunistic times? But like the informative ocean weak-acid/buffer post I tried several weaks ago, this too was blocked.

The double-standard at RC’s post-review policy is obvious. Will such policy be embraced at Deltoid, soon — or is Dr Lambert’s slow deliberation in reviving old AGW climate threads just another form of controlling the debate on his blog?